Page 42 - OHS, September 2021

INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE
Communicating Performance to Increase Industrial Hygiene Program Engagement
Industrial hygienists are very good at documentation, but most need to improve two-way communication.
BY DAVE RISI
If you were to ask business managers about the status of their business, they would discuss their profit margin, EBITA, percent growth in revenue or other common financial metrics. Ask a safety manager the same question and he or she would
probably let you know about the number of days without a recordable injury or incident rate and how it compares with last year. But for those handling industrial hygiene, the answer to the question, “What is the status of your industrial hygiene program?” gets more complicated. Would they pull up a bunch of statistics? A list of SEGs? Perhaps, they would show their sampling plan for the year?
That’s because identifying the best industrial hygiene (IH) data points, statistics, tables or diagrams that demonstrate the status of your program is hard. It’s been a long-running challenge for those handling IH and is believed to be a big reason why most stakeholders don’t understand what IH is or the value it brings to the business. Let’s look at some ways you can effectively communicate the status and value of your IH program to both workers and management to help strengthen engagement and buy-in.
Support Open Dialogue
38 Occupational Health & Safety | SEPTEMBER 2021
www.ohsonline.com
Industrial hygienists are very good at documentation, but most of us need to improve our two-way communication. We generate lots of tables and charts of sample results and include them in quality reports, but don’t actually present our findings in-person and make time for dialog and discussion. All too often, reports generated for data users are just filed and eventually shipped to a salt mine for long-term storage without providing any real value for the business.
We learn in school or from our supervisors how to write great IH reports, but most of us have not received any real training on how to engage and collaborate with workers and management to communicate IH data in a meaningful way. All too often, we’re content to keep the details in our black box and just document our findings.
The problem with just documenting our findings and not having meaningful dialog about them is that workers and management will not understand why you conducted the monitoring or performed the risk assessments in the first place. If
Andrii Yalanskyi/Shutterstock.com